Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, and welcome to the second budget hearing, or I guess technically third or fourth, depending on how you're counting. So but the second day of budget hearings. I am Marcus Winkler, the vice chair of the budget committee. We'll be joined shortly by chair Kevin Kramer. Today is Monday, May 11. The time is currently 03:02PM. I am joined in chambers by councilman Lininger, councilman Piagintini, councilman Reno Weber, councilman Morby Warwick, and councilman Parker. And I think we'll have a couple other people joining us here momentarily. So, again, welcome. I mentioned councilman Kramer will be joining us momentarily.

So let me go. Our first hearing today actually, before I get into the hearing, I wanna make to my colleagues that the administration, just asked me to reference. And that is, you know, our staff is kind enough to prepare, a budget document for us every meeting. It can be a little bit challenging to the presenters. They don't get a copy of that. That is exclusively for us. Okay? And so when you're working from that document and you reference, hey, on page four, you're referencing a document that they have never seen. So, just be aware that's an internal document that staff prepares for us. It's not shared with the it's not secret, but it's just not a document that they don't have available.

And so, if you could just be aware that your questions, they won't know what you're talking about. So, anyway, our first hearing today is the human resources budget hearing, and I would like welcome Ernestine Booth Henry, the executive director of human resources to the chambers. As a reminder, departments will not make any opening comments, and we will begin immediately, with council member questions. Council members, you are allowed to ask three questions at a time, and after that, you'll need to go back into the queue. Also, I will, call on first time questions, before I go back to you when you're in the queue a second time.

So, these are Beth's comments by the way. So so the human resources department for FY '27, the proposed operating budget is 7,300,000. And you know what? I will start off with the first question and ask director Booth, can you talk about the Dependent Care FSA match pilot program that will start in FY twenty seven? Can you explain talk a little bit about the program and then the expected expenses associated with it,

afternoon. Ernestine Booth Henry, Executive Director for Human Resources. Thank you, Mr. Chair. As far as the Dependent Care FSA, that program is designed to assist our employees with child care services.

They are allowed to put money aside in our FSA program and then utilize that money for child care expenses. The current amount, the cap for the household is $7,500 An employee can put aside up to 5,000 we will match 2,500, half of their portion, to get to the 7,500 cap. Currently we have 138 employees that have enrolled in the Dependent Care FSA, and 77 of those employees have enrolled in 2,500 or more.

Fantastic. I think, you know, that's a fantastic benefit that we're offering, and I hope people take advantage and, you know, continues to make us an employer of choice. So Councilman Rio Weber.

Thank you so much for being here. As I said, I'm gonna ask of everybody, you know, please say for everybody, and I see this this piece is in your prework. What is the mission, of HR? And then how will you know that you are being successful? Think this is a function that's got a lot of pieces to it, and there's a lot of benchmarks.

Yeah. We, our goal is to hire and attract the best qualified candidates to fulfill all of our needs across the city. That is our mission, and we're driving towards, making certain that our employees have the necessary benefits, the work environment, health and safety measures are taken into consideration and want to ensure that our employees can return home better, if not the same, as they come into work.

So how will you know that you're being successful? I mean, I think you know, in terms of attracting, there's pieces of what's our hire time. In terms of serving, there's three sixty reviews. You know, how will you know whether or not you are are performing as a world class organization?

We have an HR report card that outlines all of our metrics, our turnover data, vacancy data, safety data, the civil service metrics with regards to hire. So that's how we measure our success is what our numbers look like through our report card.

Is that report card available to us?

We can we can make it available to you.

Yes. That'd great.

Sure. I'm done. Thank you, councilwoman. And please let the record reflect that we were joined some time ago by councilwoman Councilwoman Piagintini, you're next.

Thank you, mister chair. So I wanna talk health care. Would this be this is the venue for health care

costs. Right? The venue for

didn't wanna screw up the budget, the general discussion the other day. And I'll I'll give a nod to vice chair Kramer who brought this idea up. Sorry. Vice chair Winkler. Yes. Sorry. I got everybody confused there for a minute. Which is in order to help I mean, we got a huge increase in health care costs this year. One of the ideas that Vice Chair Winkler brought up, think, is very good, which is moving forward, not this fiscal this fiscal This

meeting is being transcribed and summarized.

You're on the record. Okay. I assumed that was on the record already. How the idea brought up was many employers have already moved to a model where if you if if it's dual income household, that the other person, if they're not employed by Metro, if they have if they're employed by an organization that a company that provides health insurance, that they would take the individual plan from there Mhmm. And then you could still take the family, you know, in other words, you plus dependents, right, in other words, children, which, you know, with the amount of employees we have factoring in how many are probably married, how many of them are to to income, it's gotta be in the hundreds, right, of people that would come off of the health insurance program if we were to do that.

That's not the only idea. There are other ideas to control costs. But I respect the fact and I like the fact that we have continued to try to maintain premium costs as low. We have a $0 premium plan. It's a high deductible plan. We keep these, you know, really great ideas going, but we must address the long term fiscals here. In addition to the idea I've just put forward, are there other ideas that human resources have explored or are going to explore for the future, right, for next fiscal year forward to try to rein this in, not only flat line it, but hopefully even reduce some of our health care exposure.

Some of the challenges that we experienced are not within our control. So the high dollar cost of our claims this last year really drove the amount that we're needing to allocate for the health fund this year or this upcoming plan year. So a lot of that is out of our control. We had a $6,000,000 claim that hit our budget and therefore we had to account for that. As far as other ideas to try to reduce costs, we are looking at our stop loss process and working with our broker to identify ways that we can save.

We do have formulary meetings. We do have meetings on every quarter with our carrier. So we do want to ensure that we're paying the least amount that we can, but there are some things that are out of our control.

If you don't mind going into maybe by midyear before we start hitting the budget cycle for next year, you could run by the broker and have them financially model what this idea and I don't want to sound like I'm pawning it off Marcus as if this is a bad idea. I love this idea. So I'm in support of this as well. Can can you maybe by midyear have the broker financially model what that would do to the following year if we were to implement it?

We could. But there I also want to make you aware that we did have a spousal surcharge or spousal carve out at one point. And I was looking for the specifics around that, and I'm still working on that. But we had a grievance, and so we ended up having to pull that back. So that was a part of one of our union challenges. That just want to put that out there, but we think Sure. It can

But we could theoretically could phase it in, too, right? Could put it in for nonunion employees that phase it in for union contracts as they're renewed, right?

So yes.

But I get it that sub union contracts may preclude how we implement it or

or Absolutely.

It would have to stagnate. So but thank you for pointing that out. Sure. And then one other thing now, and then I'll I'll go back in the queue if necessary. Some departments and the mayor made a big deal about this, about focusing on the use of artificial intelligence in certain areas. He talked about planning and design as one area that we could use it, but other areas also. Broad brush stroke, not just for the human resources department, but I'm talking about, like, how human resources impacts these other departments. Mhmm. Do we see and I wanna be clear about this because somebody asked this. I'm not talking about, like, we implement AI and can 500 people.

Right? But do we see a strategy or does human resources have a strategy here where we can implement artificial intelligence in certain strategic areas to reduce the dependency on certain administrative positions, maybe in human resources itself as a matter of fact, so that we don't renew, right? So it's again, not about just riffing a whole bunch of people, but rather rightsizing the size of our departments so that we could have people doing more value added work and automate some of that low value activity? Is that something that we have a strategy on currently?

We do. So we're looking at the gaps in our policies. That's going to help with some of our disciplinary challenges, our training challenges. So that's how we're currently intend to use it in the near future.

Okay. Again, I would like to know before next year now this one may not be midyear, but actually closer to the budget cycle, not just for human resources, but more broadly, how we are using artificial intelligence to be more efficient so that we can be less reliant on headcount to get the job done. And that's not just, want to be clear, it's not just a cost cutting measure. I I had a discussion with a group of constituents about LMPD and, you know, we're under our use of force, right, or or our authorization, our force authorization, how many sworn officers we can have. I said, those people aren't gonna be miracle tomorrow.

I think we're gonna have this problem all across Metro in the future. We will not have enough human beings Mhmm. To do the jobs even that that currently we might want human beings to do. So we better get get cool with automation and figure out how to use it so that with a smaller workforce, we can still serve the community Mhmm. Well. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you, mister vice chairman.

Thank you. And madam clerk, if you could let the record reflect that we were joined quite some time ago by councilman Joseph in chambers and councilman Kramer online. Next up in the queue is Councilman Malvie Walrich.

Thank you, and thank you for being here. I've got a few questions. One is in regards to the employee assistance tuition assistance program. So it looks like the last few years we've been pretty stable around '68, 70 and anticipating maybe next year being around the same. I guess my question around that is, are you looking for that to possibly increase in the next few years?

We anticipate that it will increase. Those numbers are just through April. So we are including certifications now as a part of our tuition assistance program, and we already have individuals that have made the request for the certifications. But they will not receive credit or payment until after that certification is completed.

UNIDENTIFIED And then

last year, there was some discussion on some options changing on that program. Has that gone

It has. Well, I think that our participation numbers look like they're steady. They haven't gone up at all. But the offering more intuition has absolutely incentivized employees to participate in the program.

Okay. One other question. So last year, the dependent FSA match pilot or this year, you're going have that pilot program, right? Last year, it looks like that $500,000 appropriation was not used, so that's going to roll over into this year. Is there a reason that was not used? We wanted

to ensure that we had the funding because we had to go through the open enrollment process for employees to select or elect to go into the dependent FSA. So we wanted to ensure that those funds were available for us this upcoming fiscal year. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Arsen, could you or Doctor. Booth, I'm sorry. Could you speak to the contractual services in your budget? What is the it's about $1,400,000 What does that cover?

So we have our lab testing through quantum through health and safety. We have environmental testing. We have our brokerage costs. We have our carriers through benefits. We also fund some of the local labor management. Am I missing anything? I think that's about it.

Thank you. Councilman Parker.

Yes. Thank you. My question goes back to health insurance again. So, the question was posed last week if, Metro and the mayor's office or your department has ever checked into a comparison a comparison of being self insured versus purchasing on the private market. So is, I was wondering if all government agencies are self insured. And

could you have you ever, your department, thought about doing a cost comparison? So I'm not certain about all government agencies being self insured, but I can speak to the fact that as an employer the size that we are, the private market would not be the best solution for us.

Okay. And given the fact that you just said that we had a really bad late year last year with an extra 6,000,000 or just one person. We just added new employees to that. I don't think it starts till 2028. So, what are your thoughts about the extra payout. I think it was the fiscal impact was or projection was an extra million dollars. What are your thoughts about that?

So I am concerned about our ability to maintain that zero premium coverage at all tier levels. That's concerning for me. So as we add additional benefits to the program, that could potentially impact our ability to offer that to our staff and their families.

Okay. So you would have to find cuts someplace else, potentially?

With projections, that's likely what would happen.

Yeah. Okay. I just have one more question. In codes and regs, we're minus 20 positions. There was aided through attrition and 12 layoffs. Will these positions go away permanently? Do you have any idea?

That is my understanding. The intent is to eliminate permanent.

Okay. Thank you.

Director Booth, not to beat a dead horse here on the health care costs, but, you know, I know Councilman Piagetin asked for some of this stuff by the mid year. I want to make sure that we're aligned on timing because open enrollment starts when?

In April.

In April. When do you finalize the plan for the following year?

We normally complete our plan review in early January.

Okay. So we may need I mean, so mid year would be really really tight. So I I might just ask us that, you know, these sort of things that we may maybe even look at the fall as a potential sort of like '1 might be a more appropriate time. Because if we don't get it till the last meeting of the year, I mean, not that this would necessarily require a legislative action, but you've got to finalize the plan immediately thereafter. So I just am a little concerned with the timeline there.

And we would need to have our open enrollment booklet completed by

early Exactly. So we may and Beth, we might make a note. This might be some language that we add. Okay. Maybe we can talk more about that. So of what specifically we'd like to see. But I do think it's important that if we, you know, are thinking about these sorts of changes that we just are keeping in mind the the lead time that you need to implement them. Right? Because it doesn't do you any good for us, you know, to decide something in in January that's gotta be implemented immediately. So, Councilman Piagintini, back to you.

Thank you. Thank you, and good point. And by the way, I agree. I've looked up self insurance versus the market, an employer like us. In a hundred years, we're not gonna we'll lose money if we go to the market. Right. Yeah. We we should be self insured. It just we just have to understand these are the risks. Right?

We would we would pay more if we were on the market because that insurance company would then take the It really only works with smaller companies that an insurance company would take the risk. So parental leave, can you talk about the fiscal impact, both the sort of fiscal impact of parental leave and what that's done related to hiring, right? As as have you heard as people are hiring into Metro that this has been like, oh, you guys have parental like, hey. Like, like, it's a tipping point, things like that. So how's it helped? And but what's it costing also?

So it has absolutely helped. We've heard a lot of great stories around individuals coming in and having that as an opportunity to spend time with their babies. So that was, you know, it's been very beneficial for our employees. With regards to it hurting, we don't currently track any overtime specific to the paid parental leave, but I would say that an individual being out for an extended period of time could definitely create hardship on the department.

Yeah. I I think in some cases, there might be more direct costs. I'll give an example. Right? If an LMPD officer and I just had one in the eighth division was out on had a baby and was out on leave with her child, you know, her shifts have to be covered, right, period, right. So sometimes it's just a mathematical certainty. In other cases, it's more, I think in some salary positions and other areas, it's loss of productivity, right. So it's maybe not direct costs, we don't have to cover everything they're doing or maybe just some or other people off the side of their desk cover for them during that period and then, so that's less of a direct cost, indirect cost versus in the case that LMPD officer, we might actually have to pay overtime to cover it, so there's cost.

But

I'm glad we're hearing at a minimum anecdotally that this is helping and look, I'm very pro family, pro life, I want people to have more children. So if we're an employer that can encourage people to do so, think it's a wonderful Last question, I'm gonna ask this from every department only because I I do have concerns that I brought up at the more general OMB hearings about our fiscal sustainability moving forward. Okay? So it's not just about human resources, again, department will get this question from me. If we were to cut your budget by 1%, okay?

So I think if I'm reading the budget document correctly, you're in the 7,000,000 something range. So this is not even remotely the biggest department in the city to be So we're talking 70,000 ish. If I were to say like, hey, and you've only had a one, it looks like only a 1% increase year over year.

Mhmm.

So again, your department is not the source of major fiscal spend here. But if I were to be fair and just say to every department, like, cut 1%, what happens? If I said to you, cut 1%, so seven let's call it $70,000 what decisions would you make as an operator to to live within that budget?

It would be a huge impact on the ability to provide services for our enterprise. That's a huge amount for us, being a small department. The amount of work that our employees currently have on their plates is more than they need. And I think that we're already stretched fairly thin. So that request would create, I believe, significant challenges for the department.

But tactically, what might you do? Might you cut a position or would you cut a contract with a piece of software? Like what would you think you would do?

We would most likely have to not fill attrited positions. We don't have the means of cutting any software. We're as lean as we can get in that regard. So it would be the loss of personnel.

Okay. Thank you.

You. Councilman Mowie Waritch?

Thank you. Councilman Piagintini took some of my questions. I'll forget him this time. My question I have is when we look at our average age, I know it was kind of broken down of personnel we have. If you're looking over the next ten years, what is our plan for retirement and re staffing? And do we have a plan ahead of time to make sure that we're not behind the curve?

So the departments would be better suited to answer that question because they have an operational understanding of what their needs are and what their succession plans look like. But for HR, I actually am going to likely have some individuals that will retire soon in the next ten years or so. So for me, it looks like planning that knowledge transfer as soon as I'm aware, so that we don't lose all of that information and that historical knowledge. Thank you. Sure.

Councilman Lininger.

Thank you.

Just for those playing along at home, what are our total health care costs for both this year and projected for next year?

Total health care costs?

69,000,000.

Okay. And that's for both total?

That is total.

Yes. And when we talk about that you are not the department with the greatest expenditure in our budget. What department is the greatest expenditure in our budget?

LMPD. I'm sorry, say that again.

LMPD. It's LMPD, thank you. And so when we talk about the need to make cuts and hard choices about what we're doing to take care of our workers, to look out for our employees both union and non union, I do hope that we as a body are considering where that burden should fall the heaviest. So for example when we talk about the delta on our healthcare spending as those go up, how does that compare to for example the way that we calculate overtime costs for LMPD compared to other departments? It's roughly, it's pretty equal isn't it?

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I followed the question.

We calculate overtime for LNBD much differently than we do for our other union contracts. They have a much more generous calculation of overtime?

There are and I'm not an expert on the contract, but that do you know that there are some the contracts have specifics within them that would outline what might be considered or defined as overtime. But I can't speak

to that.

The way that the holiday hours and things like that are calculated There are different variances. It's extremely different from one department compared to any other contract that we have?

That is correct, yes.

I just wanted to check with that. As we're discussing hard choices and where those burdens are going to fall, I do want to make sure that we are talking about apples to apples, oranges to oranges and which of our employees are gonna be expected to carry that burden going forward. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm gonna take us in a different direction from health care and talk a little bit about overtime that councilman limiter teed up. Ernestine, can you talk a little bit about what your role is in terms of overtime management, broadly speaking, right? And do you have any oversight? Do you provide any guidance to departments related to overtime? And then do you or should you make sure that that overtime is appropriately allocated? What I mean by that is, you know, is is all of the overtime that is consumed absolutely necessary, right? And and specifically in providing frontline service.

So I would have zero control over overtime. That's going to be unique to the department. They're going to be responsible for controlling it, monitoring it and ensuring that we are not overspending with regards to overtime. My area, HR, would be a part of the implementation of the CBA and that would be the extent of our overtime involvement.

Sure. So maybe I'll ask the question a little bit differently. Should you have some level of involvement in managing not not necessarily a specific because you can't make an operational decision. Right? Do you need four hours of overtime today or not? Right? That's not really my question. Okay. But there is a broader strategy around managing overtime that I do think HR would play a critical role in and and how do we reduce the dependence on overtime? Right?

How do we make decisions on whether this overtime is actually needed or not? Because once it's in the budget, I mean there's nothing There is no disincentive for a department to spend to the budget. Right? That's my question. And so who has responsibility for an internal responsibility for trying to push departments to ask hard questions of is this overtime absolutely necessary or not?

I believe it would it should be a joint effort between OMB and HR.

I would agree. Angela Dunn, CFO for Lowell Metro. We do have quarterly budget meetings with our departments. One of the measurements that we talk about in those meetings is the overtime rate. So we will look at, you know, what was your budget last year, what's your budget this year, what's your spend been, what was your spend last year, month to month comparison.

So last March, you spent x, and this March, you're spending y. So we do have those conversations when we see that overtime is running dangerously, over or getting close to being over. We certainly have those conversations with the department. We, you know, challenge them to be mindful of their budget, to understand what their budget is. You know, a lot of times with the departments that that do spend a lot in overtime. You know, a lot of times it comes down to just, you know, the operational need of the agency. But but it isn't something that we just don't look at. We do have the conversations. We do point it out. OMB doesn't have any sort of authority to say overtime's cut off and you can't do any more overtime. But but we do have the conversations.

Sure. But I think you can also have a challenge of creating, you know, not ideal incentives. Right? Because if I am a supervisor and I've got a very very large overtime budget, yeah, maybe I can't exceed that budget but nobody cares as long as I stay under that budget. Right? I've got that weighed against me as a manager, the work involved in recruiting, hiring, training a new person. Okay? And so if I have this non accountable, I mean we'll call it a moral choice, it's not really a moral choice. Right? But And people don't necessarily even make this decision consciously.

Right? But like, I can rely on the crutch of overtime because I've got in the budget, no As long as I'm under my total number, nobody really cares versus I've got to put in a lot of work to get incremental people. I mean, people make these subconscious decisions. Right? They don't and again, I don't know that people are actively thinking about it, but if I got a full plate of stuff, right, and you know, water flows to the path of least resistance.

Right? And so just something to think about and and I think particularly as we struggle with increasing pressure on the overtime budgets, be it LMPD, EMS, fire, you name it, department. Alright? I mean this is it doesn't matter what the department But if a supervisor has no pressure to reduce their overtime, right, I I worry that we're not incentivizing the behavior to actually go out and recruit and hire new people as actively as we might.

Mhmm. That's weird.

Councilman Biotani.

I thought there was a question at the end of that. Sorry. First of all, looking forward to asking that question of every department. LMPD is a department. They're gonna get the question. But I wanna clarify one thing, then I I do wanna clarify the HR or the the human resources concern that you had about potentially if we did, not saying we're going to, just theoretical, hypothetical conversation. So first for first of all, other than LMPD, are there any departments that you know of whose uniform includes a bulletproof vest because people tend to shoot at them on the job?

I would say not the uniform or the job description necessarily saying it or that requires it, but there are departments that

have Yeah. No. Some are issued Yes. But they're not wearing them as part of uniform. Correct. And then just to be clear, average fill positions, I'm looking at for for human resources.

Mhmm.

Fifth fiscal year twenty six revised has you at 57. Proposal is 61. Okay. Am I wrong?

I don't think I had any.

I didn't I want am I wrong to not count as one of my three questions? Because I'm just making sure I'm clarifying. The vice chair is ignoring me completely. Okay. Good.

I'm confirming. I I did not request any additional positions, so it's that count was

Okay.

It could be we'll confirm it, but it could be just in the report that you're looking at. There could have been some movement of positions at the time that it was ran, but HR has not requested any additional positions.

Okay.

Okay, yeah. So so okay. So let me clarify what this says, and and then you can tell me if this sounds more correct.

Okay.

It says as of it was '57 was the revised fiscal year '26 and then it said fifty year fiscal year '27 recommends 61 out of as of 04/01/2026. So it sounds like you had 61 as of so it sounded like you were budgeted 61 and you're not asking for more. That's what it may sound like. Is that right?

That is correct.

That's correct.

That's you. That clarifies everything. So so in other words, your your budget increase isn't adding people, Right? It's not. This 1% is not like we added three people or

something like that.

It's not.

Yeah. So you would actually be reducing the amount of people that you have currently today that are servicing the city today. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate the clarity. Okay. Thank you.

Well, there is nobody else in queue. So we will conclude the human resources budget hearing. The folks from public works are not here yet. We're going to give them We will resume at 03:40PM. So in six minutes. But colleagues, I might ask for your flexibility if they don't quite get here quite quick enough. It might be a couple minutes later. But let's plan 03:40. Thank you.

Can ask a point of personal privilege? Thank you. Question. If we're publicly providing a budget hearing schedule, why are we not adhering to the times that we

These always run these are tentative times, and we run one meeting directly into the next one. So that's how they've been laid out forever.

Maybe we should do a better job of telling the public that.

Okay. So we are adjourned till 03:40.

Do we just get off and get back on?

He's driving here, think, so he'll

be

here

in a minute.

And I don't have to restart the meeting. Right? Because it's not okay. I did forget to send the meeting for help or something here. Metro TV thirty seconds till we resume.

Correction, Metro TV at three five, and we will start at 03:45. Alright. Thirty seconds, Metro TV. Well, welcome back to the second hearing, of the day. I am, still Marcus Winkley, the vice chair of the budget committee.

Councilman Cramer is, on his way. We are joined in chambers by councilman Leninger, councilman Joseph. We've been joined by councilman Bass. Councilman Mowry Ward is still here. We've been joined by councilman Hudson. Councilor Weber's been here at Chapel, Piacentini, and Parker. I would like to welcome Wes Sidner, the executive director of public works and assets to the chambers for his first budget hearing. He's no stranger to chambers, but, usually with MSD. So welcome. As a reminder, public works and assets will not make any opening comments, and we'll begin immediately with council member questions.

Council members, you're allowed to ask three questions at a time. After that, you'll need to go back into the queue. Again, we just had two people join us, so I will just or and council we're also joined by councilman Batshan. For the three folks that have joined us, I would just give a reminder, that I did at the opening of the hearing. The budget packets that you get from staff, those are the administration does not have those packets.

So if you when you ask questions, if you could not reference a page in the packet that's been prepared by staff for you because the administration doesn't have it, and so they would have no way of referencing, that specific page number. So please remember to ask only financial related questions pertaining to public works. You know, not a time to ask, hey, I've got a pothole. When can you come fill it? And no other district specific concerns.

Public works and assets has a proposed $68,500,000 operating budget and $65,900,000 capital budget. I will start by asking how the new Department of Transportation has made an impact on how public works and Assets operates and the resulting fiscal impact. Wes, introduce yourself.

Try Absolutely. I'm Wes Sydnor. I'm the Executive Director of Public Works. And to my right here is the Director of the DOT, Bill Bell. Hey.

So question about the DOT formation. So this started back at the 2024. So we have just around a year and a half of of operation after its formation. So the intent of the DOT and what we have seen so far is to make projects and deliverables more efficient, get planning and engineering and project execution in the same structure. And so we've already started to see some fruit come to pass with or come to be with the formation.

Projects that have been in some state of progress over the last, you know, ten plus years have finally broken ground and reached completion. And we're excited about, you know, the next wave of opportunities in that space. So you have a lot of work that we're doing with KYTC on state projects. And we've seen that in the road budget and their road plan. And so we're excited to, you know, partner with them on those projects as well as execute on some of the, you know, of the longstanding projects that we've had that are both federally funded and state funded.

And so what this has done is helped us, again, be more responsive, be more efficient, and execute projects in a more streamlined way. And so I think it's been a success. You know, we're always looking at ways to improve and things to move around. So it's not static structure. So like I said, we're continuing to look at that, but it's been a very I think a very successful rollout.

Including the maintenance and snow removal and so forth.

Councilman P Argentini. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to talk about the road paving budget for a minute. The history of this and neither of you here when this all began, and it even began before my term in office, but it began as like, okay, we need to catch up on road paving. We're going do $20,000,000 a year in road paving for the next ten years, and we will be caught up, and then we can bring it back to a normal maintenance dollar amount. Right? We we worked the data a couple years ago, $30,000,000 a year.

So now we're up to $30,000,000 a year in road paving and we've been doing that for, I don't know, I think it's the third year ish at $30,000,000. When will we be at This is this is now real money. Yeah. And and given the state of the capital budget and and all of this stuff, I mean, you know, we would love to see a time where this comes into 15,000,000 and we can reclaim $15,000,000 to other other capital projects. Mhmm. Can you talk about what this trajectory looks like conservatively? Right. I don't wanna over estimate, but when could we get to it and what would that number look like once we get to a more maintenance schedule?

Sure. So one of the I think one of the big things that we've taken on over the last year or so is that we've switched to a system that's called OpenGov. And so what that does is it allows us to put in roadway conditions, put in basically assumptions on how fast, depending on the usage, different road types are going to degrade over time. And so really data driven, and that's what we've used to develop our three year plan. So we do have estimates for the next three years that it will be at $30,000,000 that may or may not change or, you know, be the case depending you know, future budgets.

But what that tool allows us to do is prioritize those roads. Our goal is to, you know, prioritize those goals those roads with the most need. Our goal is to get out of scale from one to a 100 to get every road in the county in metro above a 70. And we're getting very, very close to that on the bigger arterials and collectors. The local roads have some catching up to do.

But, to your point, at some point future, and we can do some more and come back with that when that time period looks like. But at some point, to your point, you're going to hit diminishing returns in terms of, you know, you're going to get to a certain point and you don't need to repave a road that's in good condition.

Right. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to deliver really nice roads for the public. Yeah. They don't need to be paved with gold. There at some point, if 70 is the number as far as an average rating, wonderful. And so if you don't have the number today, could you please follow-up?

Absolutely. It'd be

great if

we get it before the end of the budget cycle. But Yes, if that's too much, you know, maybe the next quarter. But, yeah, the the two questions would be when would we when do we think, give or take a year, we would be at that level? Then number two, what would we actually need moving forward to maintain that level? Right? Is that 20,000,000, 15,000,000, 12,000,000, whatever that is? Sure. Okay. Thank you. Next question, grants.

So on page three of my document no. I'm just kidding. So the the grants, particularly state grants, so the biggest change is state grants in fiscal year twenty six went from 6,000 to in fiscal year twenty seven, Let's just call it 7,800,000, a little over 7,800,000. I I think this is wonderful. Love more state money coming into our wonderful city that pays a boat ton of taxes to the state that we don't see back. So can you clarify what this change is? Like, what happened here? And is this is this something we could expect to see moving forward?

Yeah. So Let's see. Are you are you referencing the his KYTC grant or which Beth, what grant am I referencing?

What's that? Under the budget summary, state grants. Yeah. That's what I have, the state grants. But yeah. Mean, yeah. It's that's what I thought it was. It's a general state grants. I don't I don't know if it's one particular project. It's just the line item of state grants, correct me if I'm wrong, has moved to set over 7,800,000, but last year was pretty tiny. It was thousands. It's We went from thousandaire to millionaire.

Are you there? Okay.

Bringing out the big guns.

Yep. Already.

I just I wanted to say, it it's more more than likely just that it's probably some new state grants. But if you would allow, it'd be better for us to probably get your reconciliation of what that exact change was.

I don't think we

have Totally.

The detail of it in front of us today, so it might be easier to just get back to you on that one.

That's fine. Okay. No no problem. And last thing, again, maybe a question you have to follow-up on because this this is not in the budget book, but we spent a lot of money on converting to LED lighting. You know, it's been a big focus for the city, and we've all supported it. We're you know, this is not against it whatsoever. We're just trying to maybe get a sense of what the cost savings have been. Can you provide maybe some context today? And then if you want to follow-up with the specific number, but I'm curious as to like where, how much and where we're seeing that savings.

Sure. Yeah. We can definitely follow-up on that. Okay. Yeah. There are two different pots of money that we use for lighting or different applications. And so we can get both the basically, the electrical maintenance number as well as, like, any savings from LG and A on those lights.

That's perfect. Thank you. Thank you, mister chairman.

You're welcome. Councilman Hudson.

Thank you, mister chair. My first question is going be an easy one. I appreciate the cooperation and enthusiasm that public works and the mayor's office has given to ITERIS. And I was just wondering if that is included in this year's budget.

Not. Is not.

Everyone shaking their head, iTiris is a traffic tracking software that we've met with the company. Met them at the National Lake Cities in Salt Lake City. We've had them come in and do some product demonstrations. There's a lot of potential for savings across the board and utility of that software. Everyone's been in support of it that has seen it. I was just wondering if

it's Yeah. We use one at this on the state level and I agree there. It's it's a great service to have. We borrow some of that technology from KYTC and Kipta when we need it. But, you know, it's we we have to we have to ask. It it would be good to have it at at our fingertips. But but, yeah, I've seen that presentation. It it is it's great.

But is it in the budget?

It is not.

I don't think it is. No.

That's that's disappointing.

Councilman, would you like to ask a follow-up? Sure. Like, if it's not contemplated in the budget, do we have any sense of what it would cost to consider this? And if we were to consider it, like, how quickly would we be able to ramp that up if we had the funds to do it?

It probably depends on the scope.

Yeah, some of the presentations they gave us, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

No, that's fine.

Between $75,000 and $90,000 a year. Hopefully we can scrape that up from somewhere. Second question. Has this budget been stress tested to account for fluctuating fuel costs with fuel costs going up? This public works in particular would be impacted by that.

Yeah. Well, I'll speak to the yeah, some of our like our biggest, you know, biggest project or one of the bigger projects that we have annually is paving. So it's very, very dependent on fuel, you know, petroleum cost. It's petroleum based product. And so one of the advantages that we have of the software that we're using, OpenGov, is that we can run different scenarios, different cost points to be to have some flexibility with that.

You know, from a just overall, you know, fuel usage perspective, you know, not being able to see what, you know, what those fluctuations are going to be. I'm sure there will be some adjustments that we will have to do. I haven't run the analysis on this budget. Yeah.

We haven't seen any fluctuations yet.

Yes. Right.

Right. But but my question is, have have you done the Monte Carlo analysis that says what the tipping point would be of a barrel of oil before you have to start laying people off or canceling projects or doing drastic measures. How much of a increase in the price of oil could you absorb before you'd have to start doing draconian actions?

Yeah. We have not done that analysis, but we can

Okay. We will definitely

open gov, we can definitely do that

And and on our operational side too.

Alright. Thank you. Thank you. And last question. Could you explain how we're doing sidewalks now? The way I understand it, we only fix fours and fives, and we bevel those, and then a year later, go back and replace them. Seems like waste that could be taken out of the system if we just

Yes. So we yeah. There's some clarification that we got on this because it came up in one of our paving meetings. So what we will do is we will look at a segment we have priorities identified that get laid out in the sidewalk plan. And what we'll do is you're right on those those fours and fives, those are the most drastic, you know, hazards and and needs for correction.

So those can't be beveled just because of the the sheer, you know, size of them. So what we will do on those lesser, you know, twos and threes, those types of hazards will go through and bevel and then follow-up. And there's I don't know if there's any magic in which order these go in, but the thought would be we'd bevel those and then we'd follow-up and do the full replacement, which is more costly of those fours and fives. And so you would have a segment of sidewalk that would be somewhat hazard free, but you wouldn't be repeating like, if you beveled a section, you wouldn't be coming back and repeat repaving or rebuilding that section the next year. You would be doing the ones around it.

Yeah. And some of those beveled ones, they they last three to five years. It can't.

Yeah. That that that was my my rub with the conversation we had before was, if we're beveling this year and then replacing next year, why don't we just wait or go ahead and replace this year?

Yeah. We shouldn't have to replace that soon on a beveled.

Can we put that in a policy statement somewhere? Sure. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you. That's my three. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Councilman Leitinger.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you guys for being here. Absolutely. Switching gears a little bit to solid waste management. As several of you here in the audience knows, our office receives a lot of communication from our constituents about solid waste. And one of the most frequent things that we get is a complaint still that Louisville has moved to every other week for recycling pickup. This is really exacerbated as a concern when we have events that lead us to having to cancel recycling collection. You know, we we had our winter weather problems last year, this year. You know, it's leading to some serious problems in the alleys.

I I will tell you personally in 4th Street, I've I've seen rats in the alley, I've never seen,

like,

rats running, you know, in the alley where I was gonna see them in daylight ever living in Old when I've lived in Old Louisville for a very long time. What would be the cost for us to go back to weekly recycling?

I don't have that number on the top of my head, but I can we can certainly go back and figure out. I mean, yes, you're talking about additional probably additional staff and time and potentially over time. Yes, but we can find that out.

Sure. I I just feel like, you know, it's not only a pretty serious constituent concern, it's a public health concern. You know, this goes beyond, you know, one department issue. I think this is something that impacts a lot of departments in the city when we start having serious problems like that. And and also, I just wanna be able to tell my constituents, hey, you know, that this is what it would cost. We have to think about, you know, when we make these budgets, what the trade offs would be. If we're gonna have this, what aren't we gonna Sure. So it'd be great to get that information. Absolutely. Continuing with solid waste, another program that has seen significant changes in the last few years, large pickup.

We're no longer on a schedule. Now it's by appointment. Has that been a positive change in our alleys in the USD? Are we seeing less illegal dumping? Are we seeing fewer accumulation of mattresses and dressers and whatnot?

I don't know if you can point to that single change as being the cause of those different outcomes. You know, do think the flexibility of being able to call in and have multiple appointments a week versus just that one time a quarter has some advantages and obviously some disadvantages. I think, yeah, to some of the other efforts, there's been a lot of focus around dumping, mitigation, you know, alley cleanups, and, you know, there's a whole group called All In On Clean that is a collaborative effort between agencies to try to address some of these systemic causes and results of dumping and litter and things like that. So I think there's a lot of work to do, but there's a lot of really good energy behind these different departments to address the issue.

And sorry if this was me, but in there do is dumping down is illegal dumping down? Is that the trend we're seeing right now?

I'll get back to you on the actual number. I think it is going down, but I'll confirm that.

All right. And then my last question. Another frequent call we get is on our bins in the alleys, for recycling and for garbage. Sometimes they're broken, sometimes they're just gone. And we're getting a lot of questions about how long it's going to take to get one, what is generally the time line for replacement of these items And what could be done to improve in the budget getting these back to people? Because again, I think it's a health concern. Garbage ends up on the ground in bags in a lot of parts of my district.

Yeah. So this has been a topic I've been very focused on the last few months, and that there was a transition in vendors. We brought some things in house around the beginning of the calendar year. And so there was some catch up that had to be done. There's still a backlog.

I think we're deploying carts at about, I want to say 75 a day. And so we are getting caught up. That timeline is getting down. My intent is to get that down from several weeks to a handful of weeks to it's almost I won't say on demand, closer to that. So I can get you all the metrics on where we're at in terms of backlog and the time to replace. But it is improving pretty exponentially

right now. I would say Godspeed on that. Again, just to reiterate, you and everyone on down through solid waste are a pleasure to work with on all of I these just want to see what we can do in the budget to help improve it. Thank you, everybody. Councilman Chappell.

Hi.

Hey.

Thanks for being here. Thanks. And thanks for all the work you all do.

Thank you.

To echo Councilman Leninger, you guys are great to work with. So aside from fiscal year twenty four, in which we're only currently two positions up, full time personnel is at a ten year low for public works. Even with the administration's love of AI, public works positions are very labor intensive, and you can't really replace them with computing. So my question is kind of meaty. Why doesn't public works have an intention to add to their workforce this year?

And if anything, the same that we hear from parks repeatedly is we don't have the engineers. So not only the people to do the work, we don't have the engineers. And not only that, but we cannot competitively pay what the private market is paying for our for engineers. And therefore, even if we budgeted for them, it's not enough. And so what would it look like

to

add more engineers to your your staff? And then also, what other positions are needed? I find it hard to believe that you guys are staffed sufficiently to do the work that you have in front of you. So

one of yeah, a couple of things. So I appreciate the question. I'm sure my engineers appreciate comments.

One of

the things that we want to do and are starting the process of doing is just administratively looking at I know that we've filled quite a few vacancies over the last couple of years. The question that we are trying to work through and answer is, okay, we're just balancing across the enterprise with solid waste, DOT, electrical maintenance and the other entities within public works. How many people do we need to have in these different roles in these different departments? And so we're taking on sort of a study of that right now to try to assess, okay, which what kind of flexibility do we need to have in that organization. First of all, to make sure that we are delivering the services that we are committed to delivering on time and being responsive.

And so, you know, I look forward to sharing some of the results of what we're looking at there that might be reclassifying positions, that might be doing some things with with vacancies as they become available. But, you know, there's some work that we're doing on that right now.

Good. So it sounds like fiscal year twenty eight, we should be on the lookout for possibly increased personnel for public works, hopefully. Okay. I'm gonna pivot to solid waste management or SWMS as I'll refer to it. Last year, there was a hope to add 32 positions to SWMS. It wasn't funded, and so those positions were not filled. But kind of going on the same kind of thread, are those just not needed anymore? Or I I I'm struggling to understand how we needed 32 last year, but now we don't need any.

Yeah. So those those 32 were for the all in unclean effort. And so, as I was mentioning, it's this is a based on an effort driven by the mayor and the mayor's office and quite frankly, the folks in this chamber to address cleanliness across metro all year depending of, you know, regardless of what time of year. And that could look like collaboration between agencies that could be increased frequency of different activities. You know, we have, I think, more than 10 different entities, agencies that come together on a recurring basis to talk about how can we collaborate better.

Is there a efficiency to coming through and doing a street sweeping and then having MSD do catch basin cleaning right after, things like that. And there's an education piece to that too. And so, you know, in addition to that, there's a lot of education and there's been some legislative changes that have been taken on to address, you know, dumping and some of the hauling activities. And so those positions, there's still a need. You know, we are doing what we can with those agencies and existing staff to do as much as we can.

And we've seen some really good results from that. So we've had several activations where we'll go out and try to address several blocks in a single few days to get the most impact. And so what that previous funding would do is just more equipment, more personnel to be able to expand on that.

Councilman Winkler has a direct follow-up.

Wes, I think and correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly from last year, and and maybe this is the answer to councilman Chappell's question, you all had proposed this all in on clean initiative, right? You Ideally, 32 people. There was a minimum number below which it was like, if you don't fund it at least at this level, it's not really worth doing. We chose not to fund it at that minimum level, and so you've pulled the program and you're not doing it the way that it was proposed last year. The positions never existed. It's not like they were unfilled. We chose not to fund it. Right. And so having telegraphed that we're not going to at least that we weren't going to fund it this year, you've pursued some other way of doing something similar probably to a much lesser scale. Is that a fair way of saying it?

That was a very much more concise way of saying.

Thank you.

Mr. Chappell, back have to

more left and then I'm already queued up, so you'll talk to me again in a second. But, you know, the all in and clean, I do wanna say that that pilot, I think, the very first one was in my district.

It was.

And it was a wonderful pilot. And so I would be looking for how we can add on to that and so we can do it on a more regular basis because, you know, even just the, like you were saying the sewer basin cleanings, that it makes such a huge impact in our neighborhoods. So, I would love to see that program fully funded and our solid waste folks supported. Staying within solid waste management, I want to talk about garbage receptacles and Councilman Leninger started started that conversation but I want to talk about it in two ways. One, resident and that I as I understand it, the the bins that we have printed, we changed vendors.

In that change, and correct me if I'm wrong, there was quite a buildup of people that are on a waiting list. I think somebody in my office and I think somebody else in city hall, they got on that list and they were told by solid waste management, You're number 371 on our list. We'll get to you, which is is kind of problematic. And so does this budget address that? And then on the other side of it, our public right of way trash bins we've never had an inventory of those we were told that it would cost $500,000 to take an inventory map all of those and then also, assess their condition.

So, moving towards a unified black fluted bin across all of Louisville Metro, so it's easy to change a liner if it goes missing. But we don't really know where those are placed, how often they're getting changed, what kind of trash cans they are. And so I'm just wondering, how is that addressed in this budget? So again, trash receptacles, residential trash receptacles right of way.

Yeah. So I'll just speak to not necessarily in the upcoming budget other than, you know, the maintenance numbers are in there. But I think with both of those effort Well, I'll speak to the first one first. So the There was a backlog. There is Continue to be a backlog.

What we are working on is how do we most efficiently get through that backlog so people aren't waiting, you know, in sometimes months before they get a recycle bin or a garbage bin. So that's some work that's ongoing. A lot of that is, you know, looking at the intake on 03/11 or how are those reports come in, How are we prioritizing those? And is there a way to make more efficiently with routing, get bigger groups of those taken off sooner? So that's something we're working on. In terms of the right of way

Before you get to the right of way, are you saying that with the residential, you have the inventory. It's just getting it out to the community that's the issue, or do we have those bins printed and stamped and sitting there waiting to go out into the community? I'm trying to identify if there's a a funding gap here. Because if you're on a wait list, mean, like, if you need me to throw something in the back of my, you know, I'll get my dad's truck. We'll take them to the neighbors that need them. You know, just give me a list. But I mean, do we have the trash cans to even do that?

Yeah. So I think I'll confirm this. But yeah. I think we have the can. I don't I don't think it's a funding issue.

I think we have the cans. It's just getting through that backlog that, you know, we're behind with the vendor change. So it's more of a, like, delivery getting them, you know, physically assembled and out. On the right of way, Yeah, this has been an ongoing discussion since I've been here too, is like how do we inventory where our cans are. You know, one of the things I'd like to do too is look at, at least on a route by route basis, trying to see if there's a way to make sure you have consistency in the type of can on a route so that you're not needing two basically, two different crews to to service the same route.

So that's, you know, that that's something that we are looking at. PS, to your point, it makes things much more efficient if you have one type of thing. And there's different equipment. You know, the mushroom top type cans take a different piece of equipment than just standard like liners and other cans. So having consistency there, think, is going to bring some efficiency. But, you know, another thing that we are talking about is how do we do we get how an inventory and and a good feeling about where exactly every type of can is in in these routes.

And so if a council member wanted to advocate for that inventory, would $500,000 still be an accurate number? Yes. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilwoman Warridge.

Thank you, and thank you for being here. Thanks. I'm gonna kinda focus on some capital funding here. So as far as the long term capital needs, do you have a list of the top infrastructure needs based on kind of how our city is growing and areas we're growing in?

Yes. Yeah, So there are the projects that we have identified. I guess there are a couple of different things that we look at. One is the paving plan. So that's infrastructure reinvestment.

And there's also the other items that are sort of, I won't say peripheral to that, but whether sidewalks, guardrails, you know, bridge culvert structures. You know, so that that is all data driven in terms of where's the biggest need, where do we need to be addressing those. And then we've also identified in working with the state, you know, where are some of the, like, state road where are some of the infrastructure needs for some of those. And we've seen some really big successes in terms of what actually shows up in the road plan this year. And then the other bucket is, you know, a lot of the federal funding that we have, we don't want you know, these are for safety improvements or accessibility improvements, traffic improvements.

And so we don't want to lose that funding. There's a process to get that money, but you know, a lot of times we have to match and then also go through the different critical reviews that have to happen on a federal funded project. But, you know, those needs are what's basically reflected in our capital ask for this year. You know, in direct response, the biggest piece of infrastructure that we have, like I said, is our pavement, our roadways. And so those, again, very data driven.

That's the, you know, sort of the algorithm and the process that we use to identify those segments and those those projects is what's in the worst condition. And so Right. That's what you'll see reflected there.

Okay. I think when when we get to that 70% or 70 rating number on all these and councilman Piacentini's point, you know, can we focus on other things? And and I'd like to see us focus on sidewalks at that point because our our backlog on sidewalks is pretty deep. And so we also have culverts. We have a special structures team and infrastructure renewal team that deals with all those issues.

So and then curbs as well. We want inventory and and also fix curbs in all across the city. So but yeah. And then also the I think the biggest thing as far as changing the roads, we're talking about traffic calming. So Yeah. And that's also big. Yep.

Thank you. And I know one thing that Councilwoman Chappell, I think you answered her question earlier, we're talking about staffing plans, I know it that and appreciate you all looking at that as what's needed and do you have the staffing to do the work that you have in this budget. And I think that's important that we continue to look at that. My last question is, I believe within this budget and the proposed executive budget, there's a reduction in vehicles and equipment. So do you have what you need to do the work that is proposed? And how is that reduction from $5,000,000 to $3,500,000 impacting your operations?

Yeah. So we have spent a lot of time over the last few days looking at equipment. And so you'll see of that 3,500,000, it's almost evenly split between solid waste equipment or the garbage trucks or that type of equipment. Or on the other side, the roadside, you have snow removal. You have those types of vehicles and that are needed for filling potholes and paving.

And so, you know, we're you know, it's one of those situations where, you know, we will make what we're getting work. There's also an electrical maintenance. I think a boom truck in there. Aerial. Aerial truck in there as well. So, yeah, we've gone through and tried to trim as much off of that original list as we needed to get to this number. And, yeah, we're we will, yeah, do what we have to do to make it work.

I think we removed a lot of the pickup trucks and passenger vehicles and concentrating on the bigger items. And some of those items that Wes mentioned can also be used for snow removal. So some of those have a dual purpose.

Okay. Yeah. Because I know that, you know, all of us and those listening in public, you say snow removal, and that's going to be a concern, right, because of backlog that happens. Yeah. You never know what that that winter is gonna bring, but that's always concerning. But appreciate

it. Yeah.

Thank you. Councilwoman Best?

Thank you all for being and for everything you all do for the entire city and the collaboration that you all bring to the table constantly. Just had she actually asked one of my questions I was curious about, so I'll move over to the there's a cost difference, one street sweeping inside the USD versus one outside of the urban service district. How much is anticipated to receive from KYTC for the reimbursement of the street sweeping and the state roads?

Yeah, that's a great question. We have just talked about this today about getting a, an estimate together because the majority of those roads outside the USD are state

Yeah. State highways. So Yeah. They they have not come up with, their formula or their their maintenance agreements yet. I tried to get that information out of them today, and they they they still don't have it.

But

Tried to get something back before the budget

So we don't really know if there's a cost difference between inside or outside?

No. I don't know about the different We'll find out, yeah.

Okay.

All right. Mowing cycles. Was the cost for using a contractor to perform this work, do you know is that sufficient, or are you all looking at other ways other than contracting that out that may be cheaper? Or does it seem like that's the best route?

I think well, some of it depends on which location you're talking about. You know, I think just personal philosophy is if we have the equipment and can do it in house, have the personnel, then that's what we're going to want to do. But obviously, we need contracting support to augment and support our staff. Yes, I'll get back to you on the like sort of the balance between what we're spending or what we're using internal versus external.

Okay. So that would kind of narrow down like what the cost is for outsourcing it? Okay. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilwoman Parker.

Yes. Thank you. I'm going to go back to the $7,000,000 in grants that we got from the state. Do you know what that funding source came from from the state? Was it from the revamping of the Formula Fist from the gas tax or was it just because they had a budget surplus? Do you and the reason I ask is because I just wondered if we could now expect that much or something like that figure from year to year.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's I I think I think you're probably right on target, and some of that was from surplus. But, you know, I don't know what it's going to be year to year. That's something that as soon as we find out, we'll have to pass that on.

Okay. And then, with the 65,000,000 in proposed projects for '27, do you feel like public works has the contractors, the staff, the equipment to complete those projects timely? And the reason I ask that is because in past budgets with parks, we've actually tried to give them more money. And they said, well, you can give us more money, but we can't spend it because we don't have the resources to do the work. So

Yes. We have a

hard time turning down money.

Yeah. To answer your question, yeah, I if I feel very comfortable that we are gonna be able to to spend what we have, whether it's internal staff, project management, or if we have to augment with consulting support, we'll find a way to especially when you're talking about a lot of these projects have, you know, federal funding or state funding, then, you know, we want to fulfill our obligations so that we're not losing a huge opportunity with air. So, yeah, I'm very

comfortable that

we'll Is be there any able plan to add any more paving contractors? Or is there any even available?

So immediately not immediately. I'll have to check on when that when those existing contracts expire or renew. One of the things that we are talking about with procurement are what are some different options in terms of expanding our contractor pool just in general. And so continue to work through what are some pathways that we might be able to take to I think you have more contractors available that's going to lead to a better product and better timelines. And it might actually

lower cost a little bit with a little bit more competition. Could.

So we're excited to continue to work with them to find, you know, those opportunities while still, you know, working within our model procurement code.

Okay. Thank you.

Yep.

Councilman Winkler. Councilman Winkler.

Thank you. Wes, I've got a couple of questions. Actually, I'm going ask sort of the inverse from Councilman Parker's question. So I thought with the influx of federal dollars that we got over the last couple of years, we had a capacity I thought we added some project management resources.

We did.

Were those contractual services? Or do we add employees? And if we added employees, now that a lot of that federal funding has gone out the window, will we attrite those positions back down? Or kind of talk about that staffing plan.

Yes. So yeah, obviously we'll need to follow-up with the results of that staffing plan once we get through it. But you know, right now there's sort of the bad and the good of federal projects and federal monies is that it will span multiple years. And so just having an influx unfortunately doesn't mean that we're gonna have get through that influx in a single year. And so, you know, I think there are several ways to address that.

Again, would sort of fall back on that staffing plan to give some of those answers. But, yeah, I think that's something we'll definitely have to consider as part of that.

So it's a maybe, but down the road. Maybe. Yeah. So I was looking through your detailed budget, and I don't need you to go through these line by line, but I'm curious because there's quite a few lines that changed pretty dramatically. So like your construction services contract went from zero to 400 ks, your DNU contract, which I don't know what that is, went from 1,000,000 to zero, Your uniform rentals went, I think, from 250 k to zero. Grounds maintenance went from zero to 471. Is that just stuff moving between, like, it's all the same stuff and it's just classified differently? Or is that Aaron shaking his head? So it's all essentially the same stuff. They're just in different buckets.

It's different class.

Yes. Perfect. Thank you. So that's good. The I noticed there was almost no increase in salt. And, you know, I know you can't predict the winner, but I'm surprised given this past year and then the commentary about salt. I am surprised that there's not an increase in the SALT budget for this year. And I don't know if you're comfortable with that.

Yeah. So just speaking generally about about SALT. We have in the last few weeks, we're at the point where both the above ground storage was around 16,000 tons at different locations in the domes. And the underground storage which is in the cave is around 20,000 tons. So we're in the process of basically offloading salt and refilling the underground right now.

So we're almost to the point where we're back at full across the board, which is a good good place to be. One of the things that that we looked at in this past year, we do get reimbursed from the state for our salt usage and some of those purchases. They did, in fact, raise that cap by 400,000 or so, which is a good thing just because of the event we had. You know, the thinking is that with salt going up as much as it is, that we'll maintain these levels. You know, if it's a situation where we have another, God forbid, we have another event like this past winter, then, you know, we'll have to make arrangements to hopefully get another cap raise from the state.

So, yeah.

I have an immediate follow-up for the salt, if don't mind. I hear you saying that we're good, and that's fine. What is the current how are we doing with suburban cities that have the capacity to lay salt and them being able to purchase through our contract enough salt for them as well. Because obviously, because we purchase so much, we're getting a much better rate. And I know some of our suburban cities have taken advantage of that. I don't know if all of them have or even if it's been made aware to them like Shively Prospect,

Jefferson Town for sure. Yes, many of them have. And yes, so when that happens, you know, other entities like MSD purchases salt from us. And so what happens is when that happens, they will be invoiced for that salt that they use. So and we're all in this together and so we're working together on it. And so it works well.

That would be my hope, like we're not seeking a profit. We just want to make it we want make it as available as we can at the price we're I

want to shift gears, Wes. I've got two other questions. The first is, we talked a little bit about trash receptacles and those sorts of things. I would like to see if if you all, before we vote on the budget, if we could get the cost, if we at least ran a route that put trash cans at all of the bus stops? I mean, this is a perennial problem that I think those of us outside of the USD deal with. A lot of times, we ask neighboring businesses if they'll maintain the trash can at the bus stop. It's not really their responsibility. I mean, some of them do it, some of them don't. And I would be curious what it would cost. Put a trash can, pick it up once every three days.

I don't know what your usual trash run is once a week. But if we can get that cost, it would be great.

Okay.

Okay? And then the last question I had, piggybacking a little bit off Councilman Bass' question about street sweeping. So this is sort of a broader question just about budgetary strategy in general. It's my understanding in past budget cycles that we have had contractors, and I'll use that, whether it's paving companies or in this case street sweeping companies that have been reticent to make investments in capital equipment because, you know, if you're a street sweeper, there's probably not 80 customers you can call on that need street sweeping. There's probably us and some suburban cities that use a street sweeper.

And so for me as a business owner to make the investment of buying a second or third Street Sweeper truck without any knowledge of what Metro is going to fund Street Sweeper at for future years, it can be very difficult to make that sort of capital investment because there's no other customers that I can conceivably get. I'm curious, number one, it's similarly with paving. I've heard of paving companies that, again, not knowing are we going to fund paving at $20,000,000 or $30,000,000 a year. So the question that I have is, number one, do you perceive that to be a problem? And number two, is there value in us in in those sorts of potential cases telegraphing in a longer term way, like, hey, we, you know, want to fund street sweeping at a $150,000 for the next five years.

I think we've done a good job of that with the paving budget. I think, you know, we've very clearly said paving, you know, we intend to fund at 30,000,000. And hopefully, that gives the private sector, you know, some level of of certainty of what can happen. Mean, obviously, we don't obligate any future council. I'm curious with streets, think if you see something similar or if there'd be any value in that. Or do you think there's sufficient capacity and we just don't pay for it?

Well, I think anytime that you can add certainty to, you know, a contractor's, you know, thinking and their, you know, their thought process on bidding, I think that's a good thing. On the first, I mean I think part of the job that we have to do is if there are contractors that aren't performing, or if they have equipment that is not doing the job that we're paying for them to do, then we need to hold them to account on that. And we talked about it a little earlier. There might be some avenues to expand contracting pools and that type of thing. But, yeah, on the on the second point, yeah, I don't think it's I don't think it's a terrible thing to to have that kind of certainty built into the equation.

Yep.

Councilman Reno Wepper.

Sorry. I got distracted by the budget guru. Thank you so much for including in your initial packet the your mission, which I will just read because I think it is really well articulated. Safe streets, healthy infrastructure, solid waste services, customer service, safety, resilience. Can you talk a little bit about how you are currently or plan to measure our effectiveness on those things? You guys gave us a ton of data, but I'd love to understand, okay. This is what best in class is. This is how we know we are cranking out the right number of sidewalks and or, you know, three one one requests or all of that.

Yeah. So I won't make you come up here. Richardson, who's sitting behind me. We've had several talks about And she started the process of reviving strategic business plans for public works. And, yeah, some of the metrics that we want to hit are exactly what you talked about.

How are we aligning with our mission on those different different topics? What kind of data can we collect to see how we're doing? How are we benchmarked against ourselves and against others in these respective fields. And so it's a point of emphasis for me. And so what what, you know, what I want eventually to happen is to have that document and be able to roll that out to public works employees to say, okay, this is this is how we're judging ourselves and this is how we're going to get better every day.

And so I'm I'm pretty excited about, you know, some things that we can do with that.

If I can add something. I mean, data, that that's in my background, that's that's I rely on that quite a bit. And that's where we go. That that leads us to certain projects like your traffic calming. We have the SS four a projects that'll be over 12 corridors.

HSIP projects, we received a $15,000,000 block grant from KYTC. So we're gonna have a lot of input on any metro roads that affects that h s HSIP. And so that's you know, we I think we were down almost twenty percent fatalities in 2025 compared to 2024. We're down slightly this year as well. So that that's a huge metric for me, and it should be a huge metric for us, DOT, as a whole. So that's we wanna keep working towards that, and that includes your two way conversions and, rightsizing and so forth.

Music to my ears, as a recovering project manager, what would be a good time for us to check back on the status of those that metrics process?

Yeah. Let's shoot for fall? Yeah. Let's shoot for the fall. Maybe we can come to a if the chair would allow it, to the public works committee.

I don't know what to

Wow. I'm glad his microphone wasn't on there. I certainly wouldn't describe him that way. But that sounds like a great plan. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Councilman Joseph.

Yes, sir. Wes, Bill, thank you all so much. Am thrilled by the leadership of Public Works and all that you all have done and all that you all are doing, and the communication has been so on point. Just really appreciate your all's active leadership and what you mean to our district and to our office. So thank you all so much. I was gonna ask about an update on the Department of Transportation, but I think councilman Winkler's already addressed that. So my other big question was, are there any state or federal funding matches right now that we as a city are qualifying for or could qualify for?

Well, like I mentioned, the HSIP, that's that's gonna be huge. And so it's it's gonna hit a lot of state roads because they're they're gonna have they've already accepted bids from several teams. So they have a team of engineering firms and they're paired with a construction firm. And so I think it's they will it down to three teams and they'll be looking at those three. I'll be involved and I think we'll have somebody else from my team involved in, you know, interviewing them, so to speak.

And then, so these teams will it'll be a quick design build team. And so these projects can theoretically start in the fall, and they can finish in late fall or winter or before winter. Because it's it's a lot of striping, a lot of kind of reformulating these streets to make them safer. I mean, that's that's the whole idea of HSIP. It's highway safety improvement program.

You know, one of those you might be familiar with. So and so we'll we'll talk. But we definitely we wanna spread, you know, if there are issues in in District 4, District 12, you know, we we wanna make sure we hit as many as possible and so we can spread that around quite a bit.

Thank you very much. I had an abnormally large amount of Facebook notifications today, and I had to look at it, and we have some new speed humps put in today. And so it's a good day in District 12 Of Public Works. So

thank you.

Councilman Piagintini.

Thank you. And I I too appreciate all the work you guys are doing. Thrilled, you know, Councilman Joseph goes a step too far, I think.

But No, I don't.

No, we really do appreciate And I do want to and again, I'm ask this of every department. I ask human resources. I'm going to ask for everybody. It doesn't mean I'm considering it necessarily because I'll say that human resources, in looking at their staffing compared to overall staffing within the organization, I think we're, you know, they're fairly on point. They're within a reasonable range, right?

But, and I'll say for you all, you actually have a general fund budget or general fund allocation that is going down year over year, overall budgets up because of state grants and everything, but the general fund dollars are actually down a bit. So I think you've already, the mayor's already in your budget accounted for some efficiency and tried to be very cognizant of the budget. But with that said, if I were to say, hey, we're going to cut your budget another mill another 1%, right, which in your case would be half $1,000,000 ish. Tactically, like if you were forced to do it, not that you would like to do it. If you were forced to do it, what how would you pull it off? Like, what would you tactically probably have to

do to do it? So

has everybody been answering?

And sidewalks of District 19 could not be your Oh, take on it.

I was going say all the above. I mean, in District 19.

Yeah. So Again, we would have actually Yeah. I have to look at, you know, what are some of the possibly some of the capital work. Is there a way to, you know, talked about some of the programs that have small matches. Do we have to are there programs where there's no match? You know, are there things that we could do with, you know, with grants and alternative funding that we could look at?

Probably deferring certain things or or canceling the lowest impact or something like that.

Possibly.

Okay. It

could be timing as well. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah. Timing or Yeah.

And then maybe just one follow-up thing actually related to this is we talked about artificial intelligence, talked about human resources. I I don't wanna say I totally disagree because that's not true. Councilman Linager brings the point of this is you know, we're not AI ing picking up the trash It's wins. Right? But there are other things that there there are other automations that can happen. So, again, out years, not this budget cycle, but in the future, do you feel like we have ways to maybe optimize what won't be a massive cut, but use artificial intelligence or other technology to get more efficiency out of this?

100%, yes.

Okay. Great. Thank Absolutely. You very

Yes. Councilman Hudson.

Mr. Chair. Several of my colleagues have asked this in various ways, and we've had the conversations in hallways and offices regarding the manpower within the department. Can you add some color to where you're at with the engineering internship program?

Yes.

Well, I mean, think from the U of L standpoint, they're they're ready to go, obviously. We would like to to do that because we we would like that pipeline of engineers coming from U of L, Speed School to Department of Transportation. We have two employees that they were in the program twenty years ago. Actually, probably twenty four years ago. And so one of those employees is getting ready to retire later this year. So and she speaks volumes about that program. And so I I think it's very affordable as well. Yeah.

The sooner we can get them in, the better. Mhmm. Second question was, can you talk about what you're doing with regard to asphalt technology? Last year when we were having these conversations, were talking about Kevlar fiber infused asphalt. I understand from talking with the asphalt expert in the industry here recently that that's old technology now.

There's much better stuff. And has an analysis been done that shows the closed loop cost benefits of, yep, it's more expensive to use this asphalt, but the road lasts ten years longer. In the long term, does it does it pay off? How much does it pay off? That kind of thing.

Yeah. I'm sure there is that analysis. We'd have to

Yeah. And one thing that we can look at, I've mentioned it a couple times, we have the OpenGov that will run scenarios on paving. And it has different basically curves that show deterioration over time. And I'm sure these different technologies have different curves based on what they are. And so that's something we could look at too, is just to get a feel for, you know, if we changed the I mean, it's on a modeling basis, but if we change that type of application, what does that does that scenario look like?

And how soon do we have to come back to that roadway?

That's the kind of an analysis I'd be interested in looking at. Thank you. Third question, also paving related. When when we go through the district by district paving plans, some districts have clustered the roads. For example, if you have a cluster here that are going to be paved this year and one right next to it going to be paved next year, You've got the equipment there already.

Yep. Why not just do them all at the same time and save that deployment cost of the equipment? And the contractors get it. They understand this cost savings of not having to deploy equipment time and time again. But I don't think we get it. We, metro government, get it. In that, we pay the same regardless of the contract of the contract.

Yeah. I think that's why we had the meetings over the past, what, three weeks or so. We made a lot of changes based on your input and we appreciate that. Because I agree if you're if you have a road that is low rated just a block over, you might as well hit that as well. Mhmm. And then put another one on the next fiscal year and so forth. But, you know, we're definitely trying to, make sure that we hit all the districts based on the percent based on certain percentages of where the ratings were for each district.

And and do those groupings. And and I might be understanding your question a different way too is, in a lot of these we don't have mobilization built in, and that would

Maybe you don't, but the contractor does.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, maybe something that we can and we talked about it, but maybe something we can look at is building that as a line item and that way it's not being absorbed across the entire contract, if that makes sense. That's great answer. Let's talk about that.

That's my three. Thank you, Chair.

Great, thank you. Councilman Batchon has not been in the queue yet. So councilman Batchon. Thank you.

Mister chair, I've got a Wes, Bill, thank you all for being here, everybody, for putting this all together. I've kinda got a follow-up question, kinda piggybacking off of councilman Winkler's question a few moments ago in regards to the long term investment on, like, street sweeping and things of that nature. So it's kind of a two pronged question. How is the procurement process being handled in public works and and for contractors currently? As that being said, adding language and maybe those RFPs to to show what those long term investments are looking like, whether it's paving, whether it's sweep street sweeping, etcetera.

Is that something that we we should entertain as a long term MSA for these folks to to really kinda dive into getting the equipment that they need and moving us forward?

Yeah. So, yeah, I'll just answer it this way. I mean, you know, think any anything that we can do to make the a, to expand the contracting pool to provide opportunities for those to have access to the process. And, you know, at the end of the day, to get a quality product at the most cost effective way possible. I think those are conversations we would love to have with you all and with procurement on, you know, is there language in contrast?

Or is there other programmatic things that we can do to partner and help lift up small businesses and them access to the process. So would love to continue that with you.

Okay. Thank you. And, mister Trick, I have one more question. In your capital budget for FY '27, it says $300,000 in repairs for guardrails. Is my I guess my question at that point is, is that enough? And are we Bill, I'm gonna steal one of your one of your quotes from a meeting we had is, are we going after the insurance companies of the vehicles that have hit and damaged these guardrails as well?

Yeah. We we need to be, on every crash, or as as many as possible. You know, I I just looked at we just filed a report, on a crash last week. And so, you know, it's it's not gonna come out of the the driver's pocket. Of course, unless they don't have insurance. I don't know what happens then, but it'll it'll come from their insurance company. I know the the state is pretty aggressive on that, and and I think we should be as well. Anybody tears up our assets, we need to recoup those funds.

Thank you. I appreciate that. But is is 300,000 enough for that? Are we are we putting a, you know, even a scratching the surface on those repairs and replacements of guardrails where they need to be?

I'd have to see the line item this year. I think the answer is it depends, but, you know, I I don't know if that is sufficient or not. I'd have to see where we are and what we've done the last three to five years.

Thank you. I don't wanna draw conclusions for you, but it sounds like what they're saying is it's gonna depend on how aggressively we go after the people who damage our guardrails. So I'd rather see us keep a number at 300,000 and say, please do as good a job as possible so we don't have pay for that. Councilman Chappell.

Thank you. Before I get into my questions, I do just want to say I would love, as council and best had requested, more information on this year's projected street sweeping. Last year was interesting. Both the USD and the suburban areas have about a little over 2,600 miles each, so they're pretty equally sized. But the USD costs $177,000 a year, whereas the county or suburban areas is only 38,000.

And so that comes out to about $216,000 a year in street sweeping is what I've been able to calculate. So I would love to know how much the state is going to be picking up on that tab. Now to my questions. Last year, there were 31 shovel ready projects identified in the council directed traffic calming projects. Those totaled $2,100,000.

In the mayor's proposed budget, there was $500,000 last year and council actually only funded $284,000 in projects. I've heard you talking about traffic calming, but can you address what traffic calming looks like in this budget, how we could get a better understanding of what that looks like? And are those projects that never got funded just, like, on the shelf forever and ever, and that's where they're going to die? I'm just wondering how we can push forward traffic calming because there's also no money in here for speed humps. And you know, my my office is sitting on a $100,000 in speed humps that I cannot pay for, and my residents are asking why. So traffic calming, speed humps, what's the deal?

Well, it's my understanding that, you know, if it was in the budget last year's, the traffic calming, that that does carry over.

Right. Yes.

So that that will carry over to the next fiscal year if it's not complete by June 30.

Right. I guess those projects, and I can give you the list of those projects. There are 31, and each of them had a different budget for each each project, but only a handful of them were funded. And so that left a majority of them unfunded. And that was all across Jefferson County. And so I'm just wondering, generally, what is in this budget for traffic calming? Is there any money for those? Is there any money for speed humps? I mean, it it looks like we're trying to take care of a lot of paving and sidewalks but what about proactive approaches to our roadways?

Well, we have several projects where there there's traffic calming within the project. It might be a state project. It could be a federal project. And I know that, you know, I mentioned SS four a, HSIP, then you have, you know, I think the mayor has, what, 2,000,000 for the the two way conversions, and that's that is traffic calming as well. Right now, we have an RFP on the street for traffic Vertical devices.

Vertical deflection devices like speed humps, speed tables, speed cushions. I'm missing one or two, but but yeah, we're waiting for all those bids to come back. We had to rebid that because we had that bid out earlier. And so they somebody came back with an extremely low bid that was not what it wasn't possible. So we had to rebid that. But so that we're waiting on those to come back. But and I I forget what the question was. The

I guess we'll wrap that question up and say, is there money specifically in this budget for speed hubs?

I don't believe there is, because that's all that's typically funded by Yeah. Other parties or for the council members.

I really wanna take that question because the decision about speed humps, that policy changed prior to this to the current folks sitting before us. There was a policy in place that was directed through the council and through neighborhoods to determine what the need for speed humps was. And then those speed humps were generally paid for by the council district who requested them. Quite often, many of us would not pay for the full expense of a speed hump. We would ask those neighborhoods that decided it was important to have some skin in the game.

So we didn't just put speed humps wherever, we only put them where people really wanted them. And there was no money in the budget. There was no line item for speed homes. It wasn't there. As I say, the previous Public Works Administration just decided that they weren't going to use the policy that had been in place and they established their own policy.

And then after establishing their own policy, they left it again to council members to pay the expense. So basically, instead of folks in our districts requesting a speed hump and then going through a process where we determined what the attitude or what the feeling in the neighborhood was, public works went in and decided this would be a good place for a speed hump, told people this would a good place for a speed hump and then expected council members to pay for it. That's the biggest.

Sure. And I'm assuming that explanation was for the general public because I'm very well versed on what our speed

hump But your

question about speed humps is there is there has not been historically money in the budget for for speed humps.

If I could counter to you, we do have a new process for speed humps which makes it a little bit easier for people to request speed humps or at least an approval. My office is sitting on quite a few because one speed hump project you have to have a minimum of two speed humps which cost roughly $5,000 each. And that's a project of over $10,000 that my constituents are saying, well, why aren't you funding this?

Again, you have neighborhood development funds, you have capital infrastructure funds. If that's something that your council office believes is a value, then you have every opportunity through the budget to fund that. But there has not historically been and I just heard them say again in this particular budget, there is no money in the budget. There's no line item in the public works budget for speed humps. It's left up to council districts to determine if that's a good use of their CIF and NDF funds.

And as we continue the conversations about speed humps, would definitely like to see that change because even though historically not done that, it would be wonderful to see a line item in the budget for speed humps. Now my next question

Can have a follow-up?

Yeah. It's immediate follow-up to that question.

I'm sorry. Yes. Jennifer, I'm asking you if I can follow-up.

Go ahead, please.

Won't take twenty seconds. There's there's an a new kind of speed hump that I'd like for you to look into. It's much cheaper. Could be deployed portable portably. It's a steel plate with a rubber sheet on top of it. You just pick it up and place it onto the road. And when it becomes ineffective, you can pick it up and put it somewhere else. I'd like you to look into that, please. Thank you again. Councilwoman Chappell.

Of course. So, my next question has to do with signs and markings. So, we have 83,500 signs in Louisville Metro. In fiscal year twenty five, we were told that there was a backlog of $4,000,000 for signs and $5,500,000 for pavements. And considering this backlog adds to $9,500,000 and after this year, I believe we're going to have over since two fiscal year '24 nearly $9,000,000 worth of work toward what I'm assuming is that backlog number and so with $2,000,000 this year going into signs and markings, that would lead me to assume that our backlog would be completed by the end of this fiscal year or fiscal year '27 and we would be able to be proactive in our signs and markings.

Is that how I should be interpreting our budget?

We can we can certainly confirm that and follow-up.

And my last question, the D 26 sidewalk markings that are in the capital project, how is it decided that those were put in? Because I don't think that there were other council districts that had that money. Or was Has specific capital projects. And, you know, I I think it's just worth noting that District 26 has 87 linear miles of sidewalk, which is is quite a bit, but it it puts them not necessarily in the top five, but, you know, just wondering why they were why that district was prioritized and the rest of us weren't. Yep.

They were the

Okay. They were Okay. They were added by the mayor.

Great. He has a favorite district. Thank you.

I failed to note that we were joined by Councilman Sam a bit ago online and also joined by Councilman Shameka Parish Wright a bit ago. Ms. Wright has not had an opportunity to be in the queue yet. So Ms. Wright? I'm sorry, Councilwoman Wright.

Sorry. Thank you, mister chair. If I can get off mute correctly. I am of course, I apologize to the committee and to HR and public works for having to be late, but I I wanted to keep just ask these few questions. I will email my questions to HR so that those will get answered.

Thank you all. I heard that the schedule was moving really fast, so I tried to pull over on the side of the road so I can join you all. But my questions are around fleet, around I I I have not seen a breakdown of who gets what fleet vehicles. And my my reasoning for asking for that is because I'd be interested to know if we can get a breakdown of the fleet, and then maybe one out there, I might have missed it, apart from the salt and the trash truck. So, like, who all gets metro vehicles? And is there an effort for non industrial vehicles to transition into either personal car mileage or reimbursement or more fuel efficient cars? That that's basically what my questions were about.

Okay. And we can send the breakdown.

We can send our breakdown, but that might be a more appropriate question for fleet and facilities for Metro wide with those assignments.

Okay. Thank you. And thank you, mister chair. If I could just say, please send over the the ones at public works, you know, how you all address that and who gets cars. If you can do that for your department, then I'll hold my questions for fleet and facilities on that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Winkler.

Thank you, mister chair. I've got just two questions. And and one, Wes, you might end up pointing me to the office of planning. This is, I will say, tangential to the budget but has a budget impact. I've had two instances in my district recently where somebody, you know, built a subdivision, neighborhood, whatever, and we released the bond before the road was paved.

And so now it's on the taxpayer to do the final coat, which should have been on the developer. Does it Does public works have responsibility there before bonds are released? Or is that the Office of Planning and Design Service? And if so, if it's public works, do we have the proper policies in place to make sure that doesn't happen again? Because, you know, I mean, these are should have been done by whoever developed the neighborhood. Yeah. So

yeah, there are multiple entities involved in the process. Certainly public works, and we have a role in that. And so, actually we were just having conversation earlier today about how to make sure that these types of situations don't fall through the cracks, so that we don't, you know, miss something that ends up that should be on the punch list, and then end up being held up in the bond.

I'm going to interrupt you and stop you only because I want to adhere to the committee's own rules. It seems we're venturing into more of policy and not budget questions. I will follow-up with you on that question specifically. Yep. I do wanna hear the answer. Yep. But out of respect for the committee, I think it's no longer a budget question. It's a policy question. So I do have a budget question.

Okay.

Okay? Which is, you know, you've got in the proposed budget over $2,000,000 of non scheduled overtime. Can you speak to, as the director, as, you know, your individual supervisors in the department, what are you doing to manage that number down? And to ensure that every dollar of overtime is absolutely critical and that you are doing things to fill positions rather than relying on the crutch of overtime. Yeah.

Because we know if once we allocate the money to you, you've got no disincentive for utilizing it. I'd like to disincentivize you from using the overtime and instead fill the position and use regular scheduled time, if at all possible. Mean, obviously, we've to do the work we've got to do. But if we can do it at regular rates versus overtime rates, that would certainly be preferential. Yeah.

So this was a point of emphasis when, yeah, when I started here and continues to be. So several of the things that we're looking at. One is just we have a meeting at least once a month where we look at overtime across public works by department, which entities and individuals are, you know, at the top of the list and have a discussion about why. You know, so there's some accountability pieces to that. As well as we're looking at, I mentioned it earlier, you know, looking at some of the scheduling things that we can possibly do with especially on the solid waste side.

Are there opportunities right size routes and schedules so that we're minimizing the amount of overtime that happens as part of that? And so, we've seen some real progress over the last, you know, six five, six months over those overtime numbers and, you know, look to continue that trajectory on that. So it's it's a point of emphasis for us for sure.

Thank you. And is all of the overtime that is utilized providing direct front end service? Or is there overtime in supervisory positions as well?

There there yes. There's definitely some supervisor overtime that's part of that. And so that's another thing we're trying to you you have to have oversight. You have to have, you know, deployment and dispatch of staff and teams. But, you know, how do we manage that better and more tightly to reduce that number. Thank you. For sure.

Thank you. Councilman Reeder Weber.

I would just love to retweet or x squared or whatever we do now. Councilman Batshawn's inquiries around the procurement process, and I know we've had several conversations around this. Also, with my recovering project manager's hat on, when should we circle back with you to understand what you're you're working on with that?

Part of this is might have to get back to you because part of the other half of that equation is procurement. So I don't want to speak for them. But I will get you a timeline as soon as I know one.

Brilliant. Thank you. Yep. And I I would also I certainly appreciate the the historical context in which we have operated with speed humps in our community previously. I would love to echo the idea that, yes, I want to do this based on our funds and recognizing that if we have a process that works in which we can identify and prioritize those things potentially based on data, like the traffic data that we are increasingly able to collect in ways that were previously impossible.

And now we might be able to, you know, have some really targeted in this area with this, in this community. We now see traffic, you know, accidents are at this. And as a community, we wanna prioritize in the same way that we prioritize sidewalks that I would just love to I recognize it's not in this budget. But looking forward, you know, if that's an area, whether it's just traffic bumps or, you know, other traffic calming activities, if there were a dedicated fund, I know that would be meaningful to a lot of people, not just similar to to Councilwoman Chapel. The requests drastically exceed our capacity to fulfill them.

And if there's new technologies that we're able to do, as Councilman Hudson said, that make this cheaper, all the better. So that's all. Thank you so much again for all your work. Thank you.

Great. I had just a few questions myself. I'm looking at Page 173 of the proposed executive budget, specifically at expenditures by category. The contractual services land in twenty four-twenty five, it was 17,088,000. The original budget for twenty five-twenty six was in that same ballpark 17,659,000.

But the amended budget for that year went up $4,000,000 So it went up to 21,000,789 million And then we're back down in the mayor's proposed budget this year, back down to 17,000,000 So there was a $4,000,000 bump in there. I was hoping somebody could speak to that. And again, it's on Page 173 under the expenditures by category. I'm looking specifically at contractual services. I'm curious about that $4,000,000 bump. And why do we why are we projecting to go back to what we were if that was necessary.

We believe

we have some carry forwards from last year. We don't have

this year, but we'll confirm.

Okay.

We believe it's tied to

carry forwards, but we will from last year that we don't have this year, but we will confirm that.

Okay. Thanks. I appreciate it. Also want to compliment you guys on well, everybody's complimented you so far, so reiterate everything they said. But also want to compliment you on your turnover rate. If you look back now granted this is just from 04/22, which is from April, but year over year, this is the best turnover rate you guys have had since 2021 or before. So clearly, something is working. I was hoping you could speak a little bit to like how we got there. But more importantly, if you could just comment a little bit on the impact it's going to have on the budget going forward. Yes.

So think there would be a savings. I would think there would be a savings in overtime quicker return anyway. I was hoping you could speak to

that Yes. A little

I mean,

you would have to expect that, yes, the more fully staffed that you are, those overtime numbers would reflect as well as other things, you know, from a safety perspective and that type of outcome. You know, in terms of, you know, led to this turnover rate, I mean, you know, just looking back over the last few years, I think that some things in structure, you know, the creation of the DOT and some of

that

alignment probably helps. I think that just generally, things I'm hearing when I go around is that people really care about the job that they do. It's, you know, sometimes a lot of times it's not an easy job, but they do it because they care about the people around them and the city. And so, you know, we always try to promote one, a, you know, an environment of safety. We care about you.

We want you to leave at the end of the day the same way you came, and just try to empower them to and and give them tools to be able to to do their jobs more effectively. And I think that's that's helped them around, hopefully, has led to some of this turnover rate. So Yeah.

I think intangibles are are pretty big coming from either us and deputy mayor, mayor's office, and metro council. And I I think that's greatly increased over the past year. And we appreciate that, from this body, and, we're gonna continue to to show our employees that we appreciate what they do every day. I think that matters. Great.

Thank you. So in your budget, you've eliminated three attrited positions. How long were those positions left unfilled? And what impact is that going to have? Mean, I I'll leave it there and let you

can get an exact date, but they've been unfilled for several several months. So I don't see a direct direct impact to that. And so it's a situation where we're going to have to, you know, with with those teams figure out how to best balance workloads and things like that. So, yeah, don't expect an immediate negative impact with that.

Great. Thank you. Councilmember Weber, you were in, then you're out. Okay. I had just a couple more then, if that's okay. I'm looking at a supplier contract, it's contract number SC0002646. This is with Michael Baker International. They're under contract for inspection and cost estimating services. How are their expenses accounted for? Workday shows an approximate usage at 400,000. How is Michael Baker International accounted? It lists them, but we don't have a sense of how much.

We'll follow-up. Okay. And Michael Baker is just to clarify is a it's a consulting firm. So not an individual.

It's an engineering accounting firm?

Yeah.

So it's either construction inspection or could be paving program. Okay. Good.

I'm going to follow that then, if it's engineering. How are we doing in terms of cost savings with external engineering versus what we used to be doing internally? Is that actually saving us money or is it costing us money? How are we doing? You used to buy the engineering in house. We're contracting some of that out now?

Yeah. And yeah, I don't know if how far back we we never used consultant. But with yeah, I'll just say with the the influx and it's a good problem to have. But with the influx of of projects and, you know, some of those efforts having consultants to supplement staff that just may or may not have the bandwidth, one, tackle that in that moment in time. The other benefit of, you know, consulting in situations like that is that it's for the project.

And so you may or may not have that long term commitment to an engineering firm, whereas if the project ends, then if it's an employee, you might have to you would have to find other things for them to do.

Okay, great. Thanks. And I've saved my least important question for last, but my least important question for last. I've got two minutes. So I'm curious, we have had conversations year over year over year about mowing and cutting the grass and how much money the state gives us to cut rights of way and how we do that.

We've increased mowing cycles from three to five. I think we're better today than we were four years ago. We'll have, I'm sure, more conversations about cutting the grass in medians and rights of way. But last year, it came to my attention that we are mowing certain sections of Dixie Highway all the time. Mean, feels like we're keeping that mode the way that my neighbors and I keep our front yard mode. No one else in the city is getting that kind of treatment. I'm curious what the expense is there. I know it's small sections. I asked the question last year. I know it's small sections, but there still has to be some expense.

And I would think that the smaller the section, the more expensive it is per section, right? I mean, that just makes sense. If I mow 100 yards, that's got to be cheaper than mowing 10 yards at 10 times, right? 10 times 10 yards. So I'm curious if you can speak to that. Like what's going on there? Why are we mowing Dixie Highway so much? And what's the expense there? And what would it look like if we treated Dixie Highway like we treat every other road in Jefferson County? And more importantly, if we mowed every median six or seven times instead of three times and then not mow Dixie Highway every other week?

Right. So yeah, this came up in an earlier and we'll have to get back to you because there's a there's some discussion about how many times Dixie is actually getting getting mowed. So We'll follow-up on that number and that will give us better clarity on that other, the second question that you have.

Thank you. And some numbers too, but not just how many, but what's the expense? What are we talking about in terms of cost here? Councilwoman Bassett.

Just wanted to follow-up on that. I was kind of told I'd be curious too to find out how much money and how many times, but I think it has something to do with the size of the medians that they put on Dixie and they grow up and they're blocking view because of where they're at and how they've done them. I don't know if it would be more cost efficient to pull some of that grass out and just, do them like some of the medians on the greenbelt possibly, maybe every other one and possibly that could help or something like that to cut the cost.

Great. Thanks. We'll look forward to some That was the last person in the queue, and we are at 05:31. So I appreciate you guys coming in early, gave us an extra fifteen minutes to ask Absolutely. Apologize for not getting you out early, but we are at the end of our meeting today. We are scheduled tomorrow at

fifteen again tomorrow.

So we will we will adjourn for today.

04:15.

04:15. Four tomorrow. So we are we will adjourn today and return to Council Chambers at 04:15 without objection.

You are adjourned. Thanks.